2016 Will Be the Hottest Year On Record, UN Says (theguardian.com) 284
2016 will very likely be the hottest year on record and a new high for the third year in a row, according to the UN. It means 16 of the 17 hottest years on record will have been this century. From an article on The Guardian:The scorching temperatures around the world, and the extreme weather they drive, mean the impacts of climate change on people are coming sooner and with more ferocity than expected, according to scientists. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, published on Monday at the global climate summit in Morocco, found the global temperature in 2016 is running 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. This is perilously close to to the 1.5C target included as an aim of the Paris climate agreement last December. The El Nino weather phenomenon helped push temperatures even higher in early 2016 but the global warming caused by the greenhouse gas emissions from human activities remains the strongest factor.
How to prevent it? Raise taxes! (Score:5, Funny)
Raising taxes makes it get colder out.
Re:How to prevent it? Raise taxes! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How to prevent it? Raise taxes! (Score:5, Insightful)
A supposedly free market depends on fully informed consumers and producers both making rational choices for their own interests.
Just look at that statement. Look at the assumptions built into it. Tell me that's not a lot of horse shit. Information imbalance always existed. People are hardly rational. Free markets never existed, even when humanity consisted of 300 or so person pre-metal tribes.
And then Led Zeppelin came along.
But seriously, a free market is like a unicorn, with wings and the whole nine yards - a unicorn can be described, even painted, animated, carved into wood/stone/titanium, and stories and games written around it, but it doesn't exist and never will. Just like a free market.
It is a figment of imagination and always will be. The fact that so many believe that it's a real thing says that a lot of people are willing to believe bullshit. It's not a fact. It's a religion. It's like believing that My Little Pony Friendship is Magic is a documentary. Rational adults know better.
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BMO
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Re:How to prevent it? Raise taxes! (Score:5, Insightful)
A 'science' built on false assumptions is what we call a pseudo-science. Much like homeopathy.
>what friedman says
Friedman can go piss up a rope. I read his book "the world is flat" and I have come to the conclusion that he entirely believes his own bullshit. Which is what it is. He argues that capital /should/ be fungible and it's a great thing that it is. The problem is that people aren't. There is no such thing as the free movement of people which is what you'd expect in a true free-market where capital is allocated.
And he sees none of his views as harmful. So he can go fuck himself with his own book.
>what we can do
Deal with the market as it is, instead of trying to do it through gedankenexperiments-as-religion based upon nonsense.
They (economists like Friedman) keep trying to make Economics a hard science, when it's not - it's a soft science at best like Sociology. It's not physics and will never be like physics.
But they will keep trying, and getting people to buy their tomes. Because witchcraft still sells.
--
BMO
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It's just a simple tragedy of the commons. If one person disposes of their waste in the river, it's not a huge problem. If everyone does it, the river becomes polluted and unusable for everyone. Unfortunately, there is little incentive for each individual to bare the cost of proper waste disposal, especially when they point to the group on the other side of the river that seems to be dumping in it already.
Enough individuals will take the cheapest option to ensure that any market, free or otherwise, will cho
Re:How to prevent it? Raise taxes! (Score:5, Informative)
And in case you don't believe what's written, here it is from Milton's own mouth - discussion at 2:08 into the video, and he comments on taxing pollution at 3:08:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH0O_JjH06k [youtube.com]
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As for carbon dioxide not being a pollutant, Milton just happened to have addressed that as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPnJHfiFWJw#t=1m11s [youtube.com]
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So is water, but try sticking your head in a bucket of it for an hour and tell us how you feel.
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I make the post and it gets modded down, so I quote it again. I got karma, how long are we going to play this game?
Repeating yourself doesn't make the original statement any less moronic. Nobody has ever said that it is taxation itself that cools the system planet, apart from the OP and I suspect it was said because making pertinent arguments is just too hard for some people.
And repeating yourself just because someone nodded you down is just pathetic. If what you said was actually useful to anyone then someone else will mod you back up. But if all you are doing is repeating yourself just to get a rise out of someone the
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And repeating yourself just because someone nodded you down is just pathetic. If what you said was actually useful to anyone then someone else will mod you back up. But if all you are doing is repeating yourself just to get a rise out of someone then you are being a troll and deserve downwards moderation.
My intent was not to "get a rise out of someone" but to encourage debate. Perhaps that is in some ways a distinction without a difference but I thought the point needed to be raised. All too often I'll see people get modded down not because they said anything provocative but because they said something unpopular. Again that might be a distinction without a difference.
Since I see that someone has responded to the anonymous post in question, and got modded up to +5, I believe I was successful in what I int
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Don't just tax the rich. Tax excess and wasteful consumption, extreme luxury taxes to reflect the abusive and sickening waste of resource and the insane need to burn the planet to the ground to feed marketing driven ego.
2016, old calendar (Score:5, Funny)
It's 1, in the Trump Revolutionary Calendar. It's the 15th of Trumptember.
Re:2016, old calendar (Score:5, Funny)
Glad President Sanders taking action on this (Score:4, Insightful)
Luckily for all we Americans, President Bernie Sanders has committed to taking action on global warming, saving the coastal states from massive floods and storms, and ending the massive subsidies for inefficient fossil fuels like coal and oil, while transitioning our workforce to higher paying jobs in solar and wind installation and maintenance, jobs that are 1000 times more than any propping up of a dying fossil fuel pipeline would be.
We dodged one when that Trump guy lost. That was close.
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Was a good thing Hillary dropped her candidacy before the primaries.
She probably would cheat her way in and end losing up to the republican candidate.
Bernie and Hillary are "soft" AGW deniers (Score:2)
How Many Paid Oil/Gas Industry Trolls Post Here? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I gave up on fighting against the astroturfers here a few years back... wasn't worth the effort and stress anymore. I can still get good discussion about topics that matter to me at reddit -- just need to stay away from some of the subreddits there.
Every once in a while I come check on Slashdot, and remember anew why I left. The place went to shit once the sockpuppet accounts got critical mass on mod points.
Re:How Many Paid Oil/Gas Industry Trolls Post Here (Score:5, Interesting)
The ultimate irony is that even Saudi Arabia understands that the age of fossil fuels comes to and end, and prepares accordingly But not the US extremist right wing.
If even a backwards kleptocratic monarchy, rooted in a Middle Ages value system, beats you in terms of mental flexibility, you know that you are truly fucked.
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Don't forget the Russians, who have a vested interest in fossil fuel consumption and use paid trolls in psy-ops campaigns.
I've had interactions here with people who are very likely Russian trolls: very pro-Putin, even pro-Yankuyovych, the disgraced and deposed Ukranian president who embezzled 70 billion dollars from the treasury and built this [spiegel.de] at a cost of a hundred million dollars of laundered money.
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Re:How Many Paid Oil/Gas Industry Trolls Post Here (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree completely, it's sad to see that the puppets are either swamping the moderator controls or worse still, actually influencing real moderators and commentators to the point that anti-AGW appears to be the more popular stance even on slashdot.
Also, I don't believe industry is going to be able to deny AGW forever. I'd bet that industry heads are doing everything they can to kick the can down the road so that by the time the evidence is truly overwhelming they (as individuals) have collected their bonuses and are out of the picture in terms of personal prosecution so that it is their future replacements who are left standing when the music stops.
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Or:
The professional anti-AGW trolls have campaigned successfully and there are otherwise intelligent people here who honestly believe the BS they have been fed elsewhere.
We saw the same thing here recently when /. was flooded with SJW posts that pushed every tiny LGBTQRSC issue as if it were a matter of fundamental human rights.
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Hacker News is decent as far as civil intelligent discourse goes, albeit not much "regular news" to be found there, and the comment layout is such that it makes following a discussion thread more difficult than it need be.
Soylent News is barely even worth your time. The same clique posting and being upvoted, with more than a few of said clique posting the most bogus crap - that gets upvoted... that you can't vote down (unless you're in the regular clique) - even though everyone has 5 mod points/day.
Back bef
There isd a simpler explanation (Score:2)
I've seen this before (Score:4, Interesting)
A few years ago, about this time of year, I was told by a co-worker about how that year was forecast to be exceedingly warm. I pointed out that the year wasn't over and it is quite possible to have an unusually cold November and December to average it out. When January came around I found a news article on how the last year was merely average. When I presented this to that same hysterical co-worker merely two months later and he denied he had made any hysterical comments before.
Now we see people not even waiting until the year starts to make such predictions. Those that get all worked up over it now will be exceedingly forgetful if the predictions fail and have very very good memories if it does. Here's my tiny tiny little mention of this phenomenon. It will be interesting if someone remembers this post and revisits it a year later to see how well I did in my prediction.
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Must have been 2011, which due to La Nina was the coolest year on record in this century. Note, that the Novembers since then represent the 5th, 1st, 7th, and 1st hottest Novembers on record. (Plus whatever happens this year)
Like 11 of the last 12 months were the hottest of (that
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You want to name that year? Since even the coldest years this century have been half a degree C above average, I'm curious to know what exactly you mean by 'merely average'.
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I do recall that at about this same time (again +/- 2 years) we were discussing the "pause" in global warming that has at that point gone on for about a decade. Since this pause has continued for now nearly two decades there must come a time when we stop calling this global warming, no?
*Sigh*
I'm not going to try to persuade you that there has been no pause in global temperature rises, but there are certainly reasons why, for an individual, they might be experiencing what appears to be the opposite. One of these is the weakening of the circumpolar current which allows colder arctic air to travel further south. If you live just south of this 'boundary' local temperatures, especially during the winter months, will be colder than in previous years.
However one of the mains reasons the current
Why of course. (Score:2)
There was a lot of hot air from the elections this year.
Blaming the Wrong folks, Probably in Trouble. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always found it fascinating that folks accuse China of generating the most greenhouse gasses and while yes by absolute number of people they probably do that's the worst interpretation of statistics ever. China has a LOT of people, if you believe in equality everyone should have the same chance at the standard of living as everyone else. The problem is that we're a very rich country, so per capita alone we generate per person more emissions than a typical Chinese citizen. We use more resources than a typical counterpart in China. (A lot of the stuff that China produces is sold to us.) and so on. It's like a billionaire asking why they can pay a tax of a 1/2 million dollars as pocket change while that would financially bankrupt the average citizen. As the leading country and the wealthiest we need to contribute a bigger share because it will technically hurt us per person less. If we don't how would we expect someone who might not be able to contribute without literally dying to give up a part of their share?
And it is a problem. Climate change is likely to hit poorer countries first, and when conditions are unsustainable, who's door do you think they'll come knocking on first? If you're the one with all the food and everyone else is starving to death, it doesn't matter if you're armed, you're in deep trouble if you don't share. And it's not like we can't share, we do actually have enough for everyone. It's just, it's hard to give up luxury.
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Especially since combustion of fossil fuels significantly aided our billionaires in gaining those billions. But hey, if things go to heck in a handbasket, at least they'll have their virtual bank accounts with which they can buy food...
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No and you're an idiot. A screaming raving lunatic idiot driving over the cliff kind of idiot, by the way. The total amount of CO2 is the issue. The atmosphere cares nothing for the amount of pollution per person. Per capita emissions just means that we need to reproduce more and then everything is ok, right? Wrong, and wrong thinking at the most fundamental level. Consider, if they produce this much now with their underdeveloped emerging third world infrastructure, what will happen once they grow int
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China has been reducing its dependency on lignite, aka "brown coal". This is in part to address their epic, mind-boggling smog problems, but it has also had the effect of flattening the net worldwide growth anthropogenic carbon emissions [independent.co.uk] over the past three years. I've checked the journal's impact factor and although it's new it is ranked in the top quartile of Earth and planetary sciences journals.
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And a wall won't work against nukes does it? (or tunnels)
The 1% percent will be fine in there bunkers....for awhile.
Deniers (Score:5, Insightful)
I was born and raised in the UK before moving to the US about 15 years ago.
Back then it was considered self-evident by pretty much every person in the EU that global warming was not only real, but very definitely anthropomorphic (man-made), and also inevitably going to kill us all if we didn't do something very tangible about it very quickly, which probably meant significant but necessary lifestyle compromises. Anybody that denied global warming was frankly considered a retard.
After doing significant ongoing research on the Internet I still believe that global warming is very real and anthropomorphic, and even though we don;t have absolute proof, since 99.9% of the scientific community and all indicators point that way, (and for those that don't, all have connections/funding to big oil), it just makes basic common sense to take global warming seriously and do all we can before its too late to do anything.
Fast forward to today. I now live in the US.
I'm honestly amazed by the number of Americans (including some of my best friends and apparently also including our next president) that apparently sincerely believe that global warming is not even happening and is all just made up by the scientists, or worse, just some commie plot.
With Trumps recent announcement of cutting the EPA and appointing Myron Ebell (famous climate change denier) to head the EPA transition team, I've got to ask:
Am I the fool for unduly worrying about our only means of survival, or is the majority of the rest of America the fool for being so willfully ignorant of all the scientific research and the associated danger of ultimate extinction of much if not all life on earth, for a few short-term dollars?
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There's no mystery, really, to the climate change deniers. Many who voted for Trump are older in age. They won't be around long enough to experience the worst effects of climate change, so they basically don't care.
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Thats no excuse. I myself am over 50, and I'm pretty damn sure its real. Actually many of the deniers I've met are Millenials.
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Its also wrong to say we don't care. Most of us over 50 have kids. Besides, most of my family make it to at least 90.
Re:Deniers (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'll be honest, your sources of information are pathetic at best, no better than the people you insult. If you're going to insult people, at least say, "I got my information from NASA" or "according to the IPCC, X is true." Even a lesser source like NYT, WSJ, or BBC would be better than what you have..........
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>> I'll be honest, your sources of information are pathetic at best, no better than the people you insult.
Well your assumption is pathetic at best, worse than the people you insult.
Actually I did focus on getting info from credible places, I used the internet as the mechanism to get it.
The reason I said "the internet" rather than reference each place individually is a) because its missing the point b) because I don't remember everywhere I gathered info from c) If I did, it would be hundreds of referen
Re:Deniers (Score:5, Insightful)
If you were born and raised in the UK, you'll doubtless be familiar with the Four Stage Strategy:
The anti-AGW brigade is mostly, currently, on stage 3. They've made a small refinement to the basic model, however, and the argument you'll see most often parroted around here is "the solution the Enemy have come up with is wrong/ineffective because Al Gore sucks donkey balls". I paraphrase only slightly.
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Yes I'm familiar with the comedy show that came from, but what you're apparently insinuating is that the UK/EU is all talk and has actually done nothing to reduce carbon emissions in the last 15 years, which is very not true. UK emissions were 35% below 1990 levels in 2014.
https://www.theccc.org.uk/tack... [theccc.org.uk]
Re:Deniers (Score:4, Informative)
Two minor corrections:
global warming was not only real, but very definitely anthropomorphic (man-made)
"Anthopomorphic" means "having human characteristics" or "human-like". The word you want is "anthropogenic".
also inevitably going to kill us all if we didn't do something very tangible about it very quickly
It's extremely unlikely that it will kill us all, or even a particularly large number of us. What it will do is make us move a lot of people and a lot of farms, which will be very expensive, likely consuming a considerable portion of planetary GDP for many years. Almost certainly far more than it would cost us to cut emissions.
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Am I the fool for unduly worrying about our only means of survival
Well maybe not quite a fool, but there is almost nothing that would be an extinction level event for the human species. In a sense all those post-apocalyptic stories get it right: no matter how hellish things get people will find a way to survive.
Disruptive change eats its way from the most vulnerable and then moves on up. At the status quo, baseline level of climate change you always had someone somewhere dying from famine, and just above them you have people who are impoverished by it, and above them yo
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Well said.
...significant but necessary lifestyle compromises.
Actually, not all that significant in terms of living standards and comfort levels. It's like obesity - or other addictive behaviours - you consume far too much, and it actually makes your life worse, ruins your health, but you imagine you can't live without it. But when you have to, it turns out that you start feeling better, your health improves, and so on. How much does any person actually need to live a life that they would feel good about? Hard to answer, of course, but certainly a lot less
Re:Deniers (Score:5, Insightful)
There would be climatologists whether AGW was happening or not. And who has more to lose at this point, a few thousand researchers, or large international corporations? You have literally concocted the dumbest conspiracy theory in history, and for what, because you're too much a coward or too selfish?
Grow the fuck up, moron. The Universe doesn't care about your stock fucking portfolio or how much it costs to gas up your fucking car. CO2's properties have been known for over a century, and concocting conspiracy theories to make yourself feel better is irrelevant to the laws of fucking physics.
Jesus Christ, grow the fuck up.
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Nicely said. I've gotten over being polite to these lying c^cksuckers. They're exactly like the scumbags the cigarette industry dug up and/or paid to deny the link between cancer and smoking.
But...but...but... (Score:2)
half the people on slashdot told me warming has paused for over a decade now.
Could they have been lying ? Never...
And Trump Will ? (Score:2)
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The numbers are a global average. Do you understand how averages work?
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Yes I do, but wouldn't a cooler summer and warmer winter just be nicer anyway. We can call it global equalization and it should round things off nicely with the global cooling scare of the 70s and 80s and current global warming.
Re:Is this from The Onion? (Score:4, Informative)
The record-smashing heat led to searing heatwaves across the year: a new high of 42.7C was recorded in Pretoria, South Africa in January; Mae Hong Son in Thailand saw 44.6C on 28 April; Phalodi in India reached 51.0C in May and Mitribah in Kuwait recorded 54.0C in July. Parts of Arctic Russia also saw extreme warming - 6C to 7C above average.
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Regarding hurricanes, etc., I think -- and I could be wrong, I'm no climatologist -- the relevant thing is the higher moments (e.g., variance), not the mean. That is to say, given that we have such a poor understanding of climate, a prediction such as
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The hurricane machine is remarkably sensitive to many different factors. Because of this, it's a lousy predictor for global warming. Although long-term statistical effects in terms of location and intensity may eventually correlate.
On the other hand, thermometers all over the globe have been crawling up at a virtually linear pace for all those years you mentioned. I "enjoyed" some of it myself this year, in January, where I came within an inch of switching on the air conditioning when it should have been cl
Re:Is this from The Onion? (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Is this from The Onion? (Score:4, Informative)
http://phys.org/news/2016-03-r... [phys.org]
Re:Is this from The Onion? (Score:5, Funny)
I personally don't really understand
You could have just stopped typing there.
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Well, you changed my mind. Thanks for letting me know that the ultimate goal of the UNFCCC these past 25 years or so is to drain people of money. I thought it had something to do with the climate, but I appreciate your informed analysis.
When you call people stupid
In all fairness he did wonder aloud who collects temperature data. There's literally an entire profession for that.
Re:Is this from The Onion? (Score:5, Insightful)
You think the UN controls every major scientific organisation on the planet (all of which endorse the findings of AGW)? You think they also control every climate research organisation around the globe too? Is the UN paying for NASA's research? Do they have authority over NOAA or CRU or CSIRO, or the peer review structure of the many climate research journals as well?
What leads you to believe any political organisation has such an astonishingly far-reaching influence over the entire global science community?
Come to that, what the heck is a "climate change based tax regime"? The science has shown we're changing our climate, and that remains independently true regardless of any proposed political solutions. If you don't like a given tax regime, vote for a different solution - but don't confuse the solutions with the problem, because no amount of political criticism will make that go away.
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For those that don't get the joke ... it is from here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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And once again, for the deniers and their followers, weather != climate.,
Re:moderate warming is good for humans (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you understand that CO2 in the atmosphere traps energy (heat) in the lower atmosphere? And why do you think plants have some infinite capacity to absorb it?
In fact the biggest overall absorber of CO2 to date is the oceans, and what that is doing is altering the oceans' pH. So not only do you have heating, you have overall changes in ocean chemistry.
But I get it, you're just a mindless meme machine. You know nothing, and don't want to, so you just repeat memes you've read.
Re:moderate warming is good for humans (Score:5, Informative)
Do you really think going from 0.025% to 0.040% atmospheric CO2 is what's driving all temperature change?
A change from 0.025 to 0.04 would cause a direct impact of 2.5 Wm^-2 based on radiative transfer codes. Over the surface of the Earth that is equivalent to 1,600,000 Hiroshima bombs per day. Yes, this is certainly what is causing most (possibly more than all) of the warming over the last 60 years.
When you consider that warmer air holds more H2O (a far more potent heat trapping molecule) then you begin to see that the overall impact is even larger than the direct effect.
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Did you forget that plants also die, break down, and release virtually all their CO2 right back into the atmosphere again? Their net effect is almost zero, unlike the ocean.
My bet is it's close to negligible.
I'll take that bet. Unlike you, I've actually seen the data [wikipedia.org].
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This is the kind of false syllogism that results in man being defined as a bird without feathers.
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>Weather over the long term IS CLIMATE.
No, it most definitely is NOT. Climate is the AVERAGE of weather, not just the long-term of it. There's a huge difference. Mostly - it's infinitely easier to predict. Weather is chaotic, climate is not. Averages are far simpler than the things they are averages off.
Let's demonstrate the point with my favorite example.
This is Pete. Pete is a highschool senior. Please predict his final grades.
Whatever you're about to say - your odds of actually getting them right are
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Care to cite that, please? In general, temperatures have been trending upward for quite some time now, so I'm suspecting you're just another moron citing some denier meme you read somewhere.
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> The coldest year on record was also evidence of 'climate change'
What, 1910 [nasa.gov]?
Buuuut, seriously folks...Yes. It is part of the evidence. The other part is the 106 years that followed 1910.
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Oh, yes, very definitely a record-breaking temperature drop, the like of which has never been seen [woodfortrees.org] before!
Re:uhm... (Score:5, Insightful)
UN is a political organization. Or is that in question? It's not a scientific organization. Why should anyone care what a political organization have to say about any particular scientific question? By the very nature of politics, the organization must prioritize its political agenda over unbiased fact-finding.
Of course when it comes from a scientific group you'll just discount it because it doesn't represent all scientists, or whatever group of dissident scientists you found that deny that AGW is happening.
No matter how many scientists or organizations agree that AGW is happening you'll find a principled stance on which to discount their warnings.
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BEST already did that analysis [scitechnol.com]:
We compare the distribution of linear temperature trends for these sites to the distribution for a rural subset of 15,594 sites chosen to be distant from all MODIS-identified urban areas... the difference of these is consistent with no urban heating effect over the period 1950 to 2010, with a slope of -0.10 +/- 0.24/100yr (95% confidence).
Re:uhm... (Score:4, Insightful)
UN is a political organization.
The UN is the collective will of the world's nations.
Why should anyone care what a political organization have to say about any particular scientific question?
Most political organizations throughout history have felt it necessary to foster scientific discovery and invention, and to create self-regulating bodies to further the same.
Re:Paris is dead (Score:4, Insightful)
Paris Agreement requires the US Senate. It is a Treaty. Everything else is nothing but "pen and a phone", which can be undone with the same.
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It doesn't need the US Senate. But it doesn't matter. Even if the old senate approved it the new one could repeal it. With both houses to the republicans and Trump as a president, even if it was impossible for the US to repeal the Paris agreement, the US would still fail to meet its target. And by that I mean will not even try to reach the target.
So yeah, the agreement is dead with Trump.
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Paris Agreement requires the US Senate.
More likely, it requires a majority of both houses plus a presidential signature, rather than 2/3 of the Senate. We handle most treaties by passing ordinary legislation to enact their terms, rather than using the constitutionally-defined treaty ratification process. It's usually easier.
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Except that no legislation at all is required to comply with the terms of the Paris agreement.
With some other types of agreements/treaties (whatever) such as trade deals I understand some laws need to be modified. But not for a goodwill agreement saying that we should keeping the temperature increase under 2 C.
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Re:Science is dead. And climatologists killed it. (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously. Did you read the article?
This article says that it's the hottest in 20 years.
Do you understand how patently *meaningless* that is?
We're in the middle of El Niño right now. Take that away and it's the hottest in 20 years. That's it. TWENTY.
Did you read the article? Apparently not:
2016 will very likely be the hottest year on record and a new high for the third year in a row, according to the UN. It means 16 of the 17 hottest years on record will have been this century.
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Wow. This is exactly why climate change is still "debated".
From the article - "The WMO’s temperature analysis combines the three main records, from the Met Office, Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and stretches back to 1880."
So, it was the hottest since 1880. This is in line with other sources that have been reporting similar things such as a continuous streak of record-breaking months for over a year now - as in they are now breaking the records set last year.
Elsewhere in
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Just look at these quotes from the article:
> "The El Niño weather phenomenon helped push temperatures even higher in early 2016 but the global warming caused by the greenhouse gas emissions from human activities remains the strongest factor."
(Oh of course)
> "“As the El Niño wanes, we don’t anticipate that 2017 will be another record-breaking year,” said Dr Peter Stott at the UK’s Met Office. “But 2017 is likely to be warmer than any year prior to the last two decades"
Got that? Take away El Niño and we're the hottest in... omg .... 20 years.
On a geologic scale of millions, we're now down to forming conclusions based on a data set of ... 20.
Please send these children back to their safe spaces where they can play with Play Doh and coloring books...
You parsed that wrong. The quote was
They aren't saying "we're the hottest in... omg .... 20 years.", they are saying "we (will be) hotter (in 2017) than any year (in our records) prior to 1997".
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Climate change zealots are retards, but "warmer than any year prior to the last two decades" doesn't mean "warmer than any year in the past two decades" like you said it does.
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Re:Real Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Putting all your attention on pollution and none on man-made climate change is like worrying about too much salt in your diet while someone is lighting your hair on fire.
Re:Exactly the reverse is true (Score:5, Insightful)
AGW is beneficial for some people for a little while, but in the long run it's very damned bad. And you think scientists are so fucking stupid they don't track other climate elements in their models?
I can't tell whether you are being arrogant, or moronic, but this looks like a classic example of "Hi, I'm a random nobody on the Internet, and all those scientists never thought of this one..."
Re:Exactly the reverse is true (Score:5, Informative)
Why do you claim the models ignore clouds? Of course they're [www.ipcc.ch] included [www.ipcc.ch]. The problem is their effect is difficult to predict precisely, as they trap heat as well as increase albedo, so the net contribution can vary significantly. There are a great many studies about their contribution though, and confidence is very high that the increasing humidity is a positive feedback even with the resulting extra clouds factored in.
I'm glad you agree that the climate is steadily warming. Obviously all record temperatures will be on El Niño years, just as La Niña contributes to the cooler periods between them (which some have mistakenly labelled a "pause"). The important part is that this El Niño year has been hotter than all the previous El Niño years - just like [noaa.gov] 2015, 2014, 2010, 2005 and 1998. Such a string of broken records can only be a sustained warming trend.
And may I suggest less complaining about others examples, and more looking for citations to back up your own claims.
Re: Exactly the reverse is true (Score:4, Interesting)
Worth noting that - when there were dinosaurs there was also nothing that remotely resembled us - and no such thing could have survived then.
The closest thing was our very, very distant ancestor - a small shrew-like thingy called "Morganocodontis", the first known mammal, it lived in tiny little holes in the ground hiding from a seriously scary world. That it made it past the extinction of the dinosaurs and ended up being the ancestor to the next dominant animal group was not a result of it being in any way superior - it was much more likely a result of dumb fucking luck.
Re:Exactly the reverse is true (Score:4, Informative)
global warming is actually beneficial for the first couple of degrees for humanity as a whole, according to the IPCC even (AR5)
That finding relies on a paper by Richard Tol called “The Economic Effects of Climate Change”. It found that any benefits are sunk after 1C warming. Since we've already warmed by 1C, any further warming will have detrimental effects. The impact is non-linear so things do go down hill quite fast after the next 1C. This was an aggregate of previous studies. Unfortunately "Gremlins intervened" [andrewgelman.com] and among other issues, minus signs were dropped from two of the impact studies. The corrected paper is quite a bit less optimistic.
The CO2 based models are still getting it hopelessly wrong.
CMIP3 [realclimate.org] from the IPCC AR4 is pretty much bang on.
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Right in the summary it states that El Nino is NOT the primary driver or largest factor - while acknowledging that it did aggravate the situation.
I know we don't read the articles on /. but at least read the fucking summary !
If you want to argue they are WRONG about that, well you will need to actually read the article, look at the evidence the scientists are presenting for their theory and offer better evidence that they are wrong.
I'll not be holding my breath.
Re:Real Solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Should we do more? that depends on which side of the political spectrum you fall onto.
No it doesn't. The global climate doesn't care what side of the aisle you're on.
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Makes sense, since reality has a well-known liberal bias and nature is actually a real thing...
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Well this is an extremely garbled take on matters.
Radiosonde are balloon borne instruments. If you add up all the "raw data" you are are adding up both tropospheric and stratospheric measurements. The thing is "Global Warming" is about heat being trapped in the lower atmosphere. This means as the lower atmosphere warms, the layers above it cool. I tracked down some of the sources and they talk about averaged data to the 100mb level (about 1/10 atmosphere). That's about 16km or twice the height of Evere